LINCOLN, Neb. (Flatwater Free Press) – Jaclyn Daake looked everywhere.

The Alma attorney’s new client, a western Nebraska man living with a developmental disability, needed a guardian, someone to manage his life and finances. His guardian for the past two years, a York County woman who served in the court-appointed role for dozens of vulnerable Nebraskans, had just been charged with stealing from one of her clients. Law enforcement was looking for other victims.

Daake scoured court records, searching for anyone who might be willing to serve as the man’s guardian. She wrote letters to 11 people. Eventually, she reached an old friend of the man’s grandfather, who despite the distant connection was willing to serve as his guardian, she said. He was appointed in February, three months after Daake started her search.

During that time, there was one place Daake did not turn: Nebraska’s Office of Public Guardian, the government office meant to serve as the last resort for Nebraskans deemed — often due to old age, disabilities or injuries — unable to care for themselves.

“It’s a waste of time,” Daake said.

When vulnerable Nebraskans don’t have any loved ones willing or able to serve as their guardians, judges often appoint private, for-profit guardians to fill the role. Lawmakers created the Office of Public Guardian in 2014 after one such guardian with more than 600 wards stole thousands of dollars from her unknowing clients.

But with constant demand and stagnant funding, attorneys say Nebraska’s guardian of last resort isn’t a resort at all.

The Public Guardian initially turned down 98% of appointments in the 12-month reporting period that ended Oct. 31, up from 77% in 2020, according to the office’s annual reports, most often because the office has no caseload capacity. State law prevents the office from accepting more than an average of 20 appointments per guardian on its staff.

The office’s inability to take on new cases has boiled to a point of frustration for attorneys like Daake — particularly after the November arrest of Becky Stamp, who wielded near total control over the lives and finances of vulnerable people across 18 counties before she was accused of stealing thousands from a man whose life she managed.

“I guess my ultimate question — and this is where I get on my soapbox — is why do we have this program if it’s kind of smoke and mirrors?” Daake said.

For more than a month after her arrest, Stamp remained the guardian for at least 25 vulnerable Nebraskans, the Flatwater Free Press reported in January. Advocates called it “a systemic failure” to protect the victims caught up in the sweeping abuse scandal, among the 10,000-plus Nebraskans who have been placed under guardianships or conservatorships. In at least some cases, the Public Guardian’s lack of caseload capacity helped leave Stamp’s authority in place for longer.

Lawmakers and judicial branch leaders have implemented new regulations and safeguards this year aimed at private guardians like Stamp. But legislators, facing a budget shortfall this year, made no adjustment to the Public Guardian’s budget.

Nearly five months after her arrest, Stamp remains the appointed guardian for six vulnerable Nebraskans, according to a Flatwater review of court filings. In three of those cases, attorneys petitioned the Public Guardian to take over.

Each time, the response was the same: “The Office of Public Guardian is unable to accept the nomination due to caseload capacity limitations having been reached.”

‘There’s not the political will’

Michelle Chaffee led the Office of Public Guardian from its inception in 2014, when lawmakers made Nebraska the last state in the country to create a central office for guardianship.

“I started the office,” she said. “I built the office. I worked for it to be credible, (hiring) really high-performance individuals who would care for people who have no voice and make sure they were protected because they can’t speak for themselves.”

But she retired in 2024 after years of leading a staff of underpaid public servants, she said, and fighting legislative attempts to increase their caseload capacity. The job is “really, really tough” and turnover is high, she told a committee of lawmakers in 2023. “You can make a lot more money doing things with a lot less stress because of what our salaries are,” she said then.

Among the final straws that led to Chaffee’s retirement, she said: Gov. Jim Pillen’s decision in May 2023 to line-item veto $500,000 lawmakers had earmarked for the office over two years. Pillen argued Nebraska’s judicial branch, which oversees the Public Guardian Office, had “enough funding to manage potential increases in demand for these services.”

Before her retirement, Chaffee said she calculated the office would soon need up to 100 public guardians and an operating budget of about $6 million to meet the state’s needs.

The office’s budget last year was $2.9 million — about $267,000 less than what the agency had sought from lawmakers, according to state budget documents. The budget paid for 30 employees, around 20 of whom were associate public guardians serving wards across the state.

“Bottom line,” Chaffee said, “there’s not the political will and commitment to provide services to the most vulnerable in Nebraska.”

Lawmakers in 2022 did allocate an extra $524,000 to the office, allowing the state to hire four more employees. But the office’s growth hasn’t kept pace with its demand.

The Public Guardian accepted more than 22% of the appointments to which it was nominated in 2020, but that rate plummeted to 1.6% last year, according to its annual reports, most often attributable to lack of caseload capacity. More than 75% of nominations have been declined due to lack of capacity since November 2021.

Most cases the office declines to take head to a waitlist, where wards can wait up to 90 days for a vacancy to open. If that doesn’t happen, they’re removed from the waitlist altogether, the fate most cases meet. Last year, the Public Guardian took on 32 of the 121 cases that had been referred to the waitlist.

Corey Steel, the state court administrator who oversees the operations of Nebraska’s judicial branch, said that once a ward is assigned a public guardian, they typically remain on the office’s caseload until a court deems they can care for themselves or they die. The rate at which either happens is far lower than how often the office is nominated to serve.

“And so that’s the quandary we sit in,” he said. “Without more associate public guardians … we’re at that capacity level.”

Sen. Wendy DeBoer of Omaha, who authored guardianship reform efforts before and after Stamp’s arrest last year, noted that she has tried to secure more funding for the office, including the $500,000 Pillen vetoed.

“But I don’t think it’s ever going to be the answer to fully do everything through the OPG,” she said. “We’re going to have to do some of it through private guardianships. It’s always a balance.”

‘You don’t want to overcorrect’

Nebraska’s legislative and judicial branches have both sought to reform the state’s guardianship system in the months since Stamp’s arrest. Lawmakers voted 49-0 last week to send to Pillen’s desk a bill that DeBoer sponsored preventing private guardians from taking on more than 20 cases at a time — the same caseload limit state law already puts on public guardians. Stamp had been nominated as the guardian for 42 wards.

The bill also requires private guardians to visit the Nebraskans they serve at least once every three months and guarantees wards the right to attend court hearings in their own cases virtually or in person.

Separately, the judicial branch in January began quarterly reviews of all cases assigned to guardians who have taken on five or more wards, reporting any red flags to judges overseeing the cases, Steel said.

Even with the new reforms, neither Steel nor DeBoer sees Nebraska’s guardianship system as a finished product, they both said. Nor does Amy Miller, a staff attorney at the nonprofit advocacy group Disability Rights Nebraska, which first publicized Stamp’s alleged theft in December and testified in support of DeBoer’s latest bill.

“Down the road, I think we’re going to need further legislative reform if we want to close the loopholes that have allowed financial abuse,” Miller said. She and other advocates hope the state considers less sweeping alternatives to full guardianships, which accounted for more than 97% of cases on the Public Guardian’s docket last year despite a state law that already requires judges to explore less restrictive alternatives.

DeBoer introduced a resolution calling for a study of Nebraska’s guardianship system, including whether judges get enough information to know whether someone should be placed under a full guardianship.

“This is one of those things where you take little bites at the apple and try to get it, because you don’t want to overcorrect,” she said.

For Molly Blazek, an Omaha attorney who founded the firm Nebraska Guardianship Counsel in 2018, the state may have overcorrected already.

Blazek said her law firm was initially “born to take over some of that overflow” from the Office of Public Guardian as its caseload began to rise. Now, Blazek is the guardian or conservator for 46 vulnerable Nebraskans, more than double the limit lawmakers put in place this month.

DeBoer’s bill prohibits guardians from accepting new appointments if they have 20 or more clients already. It’s unclear if the law will require Blazek to comply with the new limit retroactively — and where the wards in her care will end up if it does.

“If the change in law is going to say I can no longer help the 46 people that I’m helping,” she said, “my biggest concern is: Who’s going to help these people next?”

The Flatwater Free Press is Nebraska’s first independent, nonprofit newsroom focused on investigations and feature stories that matter.

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